Herewith part of the penance the Church must endure in Holy Week...
Brace yourself for the annual
media assault on the Church
by Phil Lawler
All eyes will turn toward the Church during this coming week. For believing Christians, that means an intense period of prayer. For most major media outlets, it means another chance to throw darts at a favorite target.
Each year, as Easter looms on the horizon, ambitious scholars and journalists and publicity-seekers seize the opportunity to debunk Christianity in general, or criticize the teachings of the Catholic Church in particular. This year will be no different.
This is the time of year when the “Jesus Seminar” often trots out a new theory about what the “historical Jesus” really said. No matter how slim the evidence is to support this theory, and no matter how transparently the scholars put their own pet ideas in the Lord’s mouth, and no matter how thoroughly the real historical evidence (which matches the Gospel narratives) belies the theory, the story captures headlines.
Why? For two reasons. First, most workaday journalists are so ignorant about Christianity, they don’t realize how preposterous the theory really is. Second, many journalists are delighted to thumb their noses at Christian orthodoxy.
This is the time of year when an archeologist announces that he has made some amazing new discovery, which—he claims—overthrows important assumptions about the Christian faith and/or the early Church.
This year we already have one contender in this category: an Israeli researcher who wants us to believe that he has found the nails with which Jesus was fixed to the Cross. To be fair, this claim is not necessarily offensive to Christian beliefs.
But the claim is also viewed with skepticism (to put it mildly) by serious scholars. The same researcher made the same claims months ago, without attracting much attention. It’s no coincidence that the story is circulating again now, as Holy Week draws near and journalists look for new angles.
This is the time of year when commentators prepare their own essays on what they see as the inadequacies of the Christian faith, and especially the Catholic Church.
Just as surely as the Pope delivers his Urbi et Orbi message on Easter Sunday morning, the pundits will deliver their thoughts on what the Pope should have said and done to reform the Church. This year, regrettably, the critics will have plenty of ammunition.
The astonishing insensitivity of Bishop Vangheluwe, coupled with his hideous betrayal of trust, has provoked justifiable outrage in Belgium, and stoked the fires of the sex-abuse scandal once again.
In Ireland, a new report is expected any day now on the mishandling of abuse complaints in the Cloyne diocese; we have every reason to believe that the report will be harsh.
Here in the US we have the new outcropping of the same scandal in Philadelphia. We already know that the PBS show “Frontline” will examine one flagrant case of abuse and cover-up. You can be sure there will be other such reports.
Don’t be surprised by the media onslaught. It’s coming; you can count on it. Be prepared: not just intellectually but spiritually. Don’t let the negative stories upset your equanimity, or distract your focus from the real business of Holy Week.
Yes, the Church will suffer once again from the scorn of the pundits. But isn’t this the appropriate time for us all to accept the suffering, as our Lord accepted the Cross?
Keep in mind, too, that after the sneering and the spitting and the mocking and the shouting we arrive at the glorious triumph of Easter.
The following story falls into the bash-the-Catholics-especially-on Holy-Week mindset described by Mr. Lawler. The timing of the book release cannot have been coincidental. Not that anyone would deny that throughout history, some priests have been in sinful relationships, pedophile and adult, that clearly violate their priestly vows.
But like most of MSM, the book's author - who published an article last year in one of Italy's most widely-read newsweeklies to detail his experience tracking the nighttime gay play of these seemingly unconcerned priests he claimed to work in the Roman Curia, (whom the reporter baited with a male prostitute he hired for the purpose) - deliberately gives the impression that the extent of such sinning priests is one that should boggle the mind. And if the 'statistics' he supposedly cites for the United States are anywhere hear the mark, then it would be calamitous indeed. It does not help that the Telegraph reporter clearly relishes providing this report.
Thousands of priests 'in illicit
relationships with men and women'
by NIck Squires
Thousands of Catholic priests are in illicit relationships with both men and women in contravention of the Vatican's teachings on celibacy and homosexuality, a new book by an investigative journalist has claimed.
Some priests pay ex-lovers hush money so as not to be found out while others covertly support their illegitimate children through school, the book claims.
Carmelo Abbate spent months undercover documenting a "hidden world" in which heterosexual priests have children with women who can never be their wives, and gay priests of many different nationalities visit nightclubs in Rome and pay for sex with escorts.
His book,
Sex and the Vatican: a secret journey in the reign of the chaste", was published in Italian yesterday.
Two British publishers are interested in buying the rights.
"The purpose of the book is not to shame Catholic clergy, it is to expose the hypocrisy and double standards of the Church," Mr Abbate, an award-winning investigative reporter, told
The Daily Telegraph.
"There are priests with children but the kids cannot talk to their fathers in public for fear of their situation being discovered.
"There is a culture of 'omerta' (silence) in which the Church pretends not to know about any of this. If the authorities do find out, they just cover it up so as to avoid any scandal."
The book developed from an investigation conducted by Mr Abbate last year in which he used hidden came church services.
[It is noteworthy that Squires omits the fact that Abbate hired a male prostitute to bait the priests and to be able to film their sexual encounters. Abbate is not exactly untainted in this sordid story, if not of deliberate malice, at least of active prurience.]
"At the time the Church said that these were just isolated incidents. I wanted to explore whether that was true and what I was found was that the phenomenon is much, much wider," he said.
He cited research which suggests that as many as a third of Catholic priests in the United States are gay and a quarter are in heterosexual relationships with women. Similar statistics have been reported in Germany and Austria.
[Yes, but why does he cite 'statistics' from other countries, but not from Italy itself, where he supposedly conducted his 'investigations'??? Even in Italy, there cannot be 'thousands' of such priests.
God knows Italy is teeming with anti-Catholic politicians and media workers who would only be too happy to blow off any widespread cover-up of such goings-on.But even in the pedophile priest ecandals, they have not managed to come up with anything beyond the notorious cases that the Church itself has uncovered and investigated. AP itself - which one would never accuse of downplaying any abuse report -said in a 2010 story that less than 100 such cases had been reported.
Squires, reporting out of Italy for years now, surely should know that - wouldn't he himself have blown the lid off if he had any suspicion that the sexual and moral conduct of Italian priests were far more scandalous than is 'usual' in any religious institution?
It is typical of current journalistic irresponsibility to simply take the word of a reporter as gospel truth without seeking his own independent corroboration. It is not enough to simply say, "I am only quoting what he says" - the reporter has the obligation to find other sources, preferably unbiased, to give a balanced account to the reader, especially in the face of the sweeping generalizations that Abbate makes. Whether independent figures and reports bear out Abbate or not, the reporter, in this case Squires, performs the service he is supposed to do.]
Women made pregnant by priests told him of being forced to have abortions, or having to put their children up for adoption in a desperate attempt to keep their relationships secret.
Some priests pay ex-lovers hush money so as not to be found out while others covertly support their illegitimate children through school, the book claims.
"For a lot of priests, the Church's teachings on sexual relations are a prison," said Mr Abbate.
The Vatican declined to make any comment on the book, while a spokesman for the Italian Bishops Conference said: "We can't react to all books that speak badly of the Church."
For the record, Abbate's magazine expose last year of the 'homosexual Curia priests' failed to gain traction and more than three days' notice even among Italy's virulently anti-Catholic media. I am almost sure his book will be no more than a seven-day 'itch' itself, although it may well provide 'chapter and verse' to be trotted out by the enemies of the Church as they see fit.
However, the Italian media also failed to follow up on whether the Vatican did anything about the three Curial priests - nor did the Curia itself, evidently - and that is just as reprehensible on both sides as the original report.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 22/04/2011 14:19]